Cloudforest One Orchard Bees

In November, our CoolPartners stepped up and planted a new orchard on our Cloudforest One site during the Community Day. Those trees are settled in and thriving (we’ll have photos over the next few weeks), and we’ve been planning next steps for that field.

We lost one of our hives in another area of the site over winter - it wasn’t as strong as the others, and unfortunately didn’t make it through.

Rather than replace it in the same area, our good pal and beekeeper extraordinaire @hergenbayer has been busy hand-crafting a rather special hive for our new girls. This will feature monitoring technology that will let Hergen know how his hive is doing, even when he’s away from the site.

Today he transferred the girls to site so they can get used to their new location while he makes some final adjustments to their new hive before he moves it to Cloudforest One. They’ll spend a few days sleeping in their transport box while they map the area, and over the coming days Hergen will move them into their new, permanent home.

You can see the stunning stand Hergan has crafted and erected today, searing the wood to protect it from the elements and reduce the amount of chemicals the bees are exposed to.

We’ll have another update once the new hive is in place, but for now, here’s Hergen letting the bees out for the first time, and talking us through what’s happening. Enjoy!

You can read more about the work we’re doing with NIHBS here.